HollowDreamz

A Philosophical Realm of Experience: The Spring of Individuality

HollowDreamz presents individuality ― being true to oneself.

HollowDreamz rectifies ignorance constituting the social construct by elaborating upon that which contributes to the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the construct.

HollowDreamz illuminates that which speaks from sources indelibly hollowed by agendas, preconceived notions, and propagandized interpretations.

Focus upon self prompts awareness. Unity comes from the acceptance of every single expression. Where respect is earned through the acceptance of differences, tolerance persists, conflicts are resolved, rights are respected, and voices are heard; originality reigns supreme, and authenticity prevails through contribution.Peace is the understanding of one's self among others. Who is comfortable with the totality of themselves, rests with peace. Conformity diminishes tolerance by it's lack of awareness.Where self-awareness lacks, destructive acts persist unto those hearkened with fear. Intolerance and lack of acceptance to the natural evolution of conditions limits one's perceptions of truths, eliciting resentment. Truth defines self-awareness, thus intelligence and growth. A rigid mind is an extreme and a complementary at best. Grace serves as an ultimate blueprint encapsulating singular existence.

The weakness of the social construct is found in the enforcement of conformity.Conformity rewards behavior in accordance to socially accepted standards, thereby undermining the limitless expression of individuality and the transcendence of self, and thereby the community at large. Destructive non-conformity elicits criminality, as may destructive conformity. Constructive conformity imparts invariably. Constructive non-conformity elicits Heroism. Non-conformity amid the social construct prompts the arrival of a vanguard. The visionary channeling spiritual spontaneity without limitation, and existentially so, defines the eccentric, whether mad or genius. The existential paradigm of an eccentric moves beyond the cast of the social construct. The impact of the eccentric's individuality is capable of bringing unity to a society much more than conformity amidst the social construct is capable of administering in the truest of senses.

Non-traditional realms of thought, such as that of an eccentric, are unwelcomed in the paradigmatic-arena of indoctrination. For the commoner, academia is well and good. For the gifted and inspired, academia may very well threaten utmost potential. Knowledge of self educates, albeit formal education does not equate to knowledge of self. The social construct's infrastructure thrives upon the programming of beliefs unto those within the construct. When those within find themselves bounded, actions may induce destructive consequences rather than constructive deeds. Such articulation of power, or lack thereof, beseeches societal responsibility for progress, entitling the corruption of citizens and thus society, and cyclically so.

Hope as a facade of security cultivates from the shadow of doubt. Hope envisioned and proactively-articulated exemplifies activation for progress. Where men follow suit, hope may activate the eccentric. It is the untraveled road that challenges the self en route heights of certainty. The sympathy vulnerability extracts from superiority deems the gracefulness of God. True power has been stripped by conformity and replaced with self-debased love. The love society projects unto the conformist stems from lack, thereby reinforcing a paradigm of limitation mongered directly and indirectly by the social construct. Unto such depths, what is hope but a spiritual death unto self reconciling the spirit from existential hell. Despite what resistance one encounters through regulation of conformity, justification for perpetration serves as the by-product of the immature self in wont of over-soul appraisal amidst society's conditioning.

To grant one liberty to live a life deemed worthy of living begs the question whether one wants what they really say they want. What folks turn against society and kill as opposed to leaders who organize to lead and end up getting killed? The personal fault and responsibility the eccentric hearkens unto himself is the same paradigm the social construct victimizes, profits from, and regenerates. The social construct views the un-awarded eccentric as a degenerate. The eccentric views the social construct as debased. The eccentric's desire to transcend the construct empowers him beyond the social construct albeit leading to his disenfranchisement among the populace oft-times. The eccentric's inability to conform to the social construct supports the pillars of the infrastructure in so long as the eccentric lacks transcendental influence.

The social construct in the eccentric's eye signifies Yin. The eccentric in the social constructs eye also signifies Yin. Each perspective unto itself proclaims its constructive aspect. The imperfection of society works against the conformist's greatest ideal. The imperfection of society is hearkened by the eccentric to elaborate upon his own attributes. Until all options have been exhausted may one then conclusively accept a true self. Such is the antidote of time striking at the root, stripping layers upon layers. The solutions to the problems of the world are not easily generated in a lifetime. The means by which progress is made requires consistency of action and constancy in respective direction, for society to transform the fears of the old into ideas of the new and improved. Honesty leads the way, and tolerance preserves the progress. In fulfilling our utmost potential may we hearken Ubuntu.

For Perennialism is the essence. And Ubuntu its mentality.

Excerpts from "The American Meaning of Charley Manson", By David R. Williams

Political and social structures exist to back up mental structures, and in return the collective consciousness of the people helps to sustain the institutions of the state... The command to follow ones heart wherever it might go very well might lead off the deep end. Camille Paglia has argued that romanticism almost always leads to decadence. The continuum of empathy and emotion leads to sex...The continuum of sex leads to sadomasochism...The American romantic Ralph Waldo Emerson urged his readers to trust their own intuitions regardless of social conventions or the moral code. “Truth,” he wrote, “is handsomer than the affectation of love.” Love itself must be rejected “when it pules and whines.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson had proclaimed the superiority of individual intuition over the corpse-cold tea of rationality and logic, and he had urged himself and others to be totally self-reliant, to trust the self. What if this spirit you trust is from the Devil, not from God, asked his orthodox aunt, Mary Moody Emerson? “I do not believe it is,” he replied, “but if so I will live then from the devil.” What is in the self is paramount. It and not the combine must be allowed to direct traffic. He proclaimed that reality exists as consciousness and not as matter, and thus truth is to be sought not in science but in the subjective intuition of each mind. Each of us, he said, if we dig down through the layers of culture and belief that has been accumulating over the millennia will find a universal consciousness we all share and from which we all come. Therefore, he called on every free person to “speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense.”

“It’s hard to live with a person who tells the truth all the time. Why? Because lots of the time we don’t want to hear the truth. Manson knows the truth because he knows nothing; he knows the power of an empty head.” But the ultimate irony is that in knowing the power of an empty head and how to use it, Manson also knew the destructive force of a whole civilization of empty heads all playing mindless games. He preached death to liberate his followers from the games of the old culture, games which were leading to wars, famine, oppression, the destruction of the planet. But the death of the old game-playing ego was only a prelude to the rebirth of the new spirit.

“Whoever is going to put order into the world,” Manson tried to explain to Geraldo Rivera, “has to stumble across Hitler.” Order is the answer to disorder. If the planet is to be saved from the rapacious destruction of human civilization, then, according to Manson, someone needs to “put order into the world.” Manson has even set up his own organization, with its own webpage (www.atwa.com) for this purpose. ATWA stands for Air, Trees, Water, Animals. Asked to explain the swastika he has cut into his forehead, Manson said, “How do you have Peace on Earth? How do you communicate to a whole group of people? You stand up and take the worst fear symbol there is and say, there, now I've got your fear. And your fear is your power and your power is your control.

One of Manson’s proudest boasts is that he always spoke what he called the “truth”: “I walk a real road. I am a real person. I’m not a phony. I don’t put on no airs. I say what I think.” What he meant by this is that he does not lie, that he insists on telling it as he believes it. In the parole hearing, he knew what the parole officers wanted to hear. He could have lied; he probably could have even lied successfully. He didn't. Asked what he might do if he was let out, would a hustling con have told the parole board, “I’ll cheat. I’ll steal. I’ll do whatever I have to do to survive, and that’s a reality”? But even in simple questions, when pressed for a yes or a no whether he had a family still waiting for him on the outside, he answered “I can’t explain it to you man. It doesn't have a yes or no.” All he has is what is in his mind. For him to give that up, to lie, would be to surrender the void back to the world, which is what society wants. Instead, he says to the court, “I showed you some strength. I haven’t surrendered to this by copping out to yours or telling tales or playing weak. You've done everything you can to me, and I’m still here.”

“In the pen you learn this, “ Manson told one interviewer, “don’t lie. I stand on my own. Not many people in your world can do that. I didn't realize this at that particular time. I didn't realize how weak and mindless you people really are.” When he got out, Manson simply did not comprehend that people on the outside really believe their own movies. He had no idea that people actually took their own games seriously. This may explain part of why he allowed the game to get out of hand. At a rare moment in his 1986 parole hearing, when asked if he felt any responsibility for the murders, Manson responded, "Sure, I influenced a lot of people unbeknownst to my own understanding of it. I didn't understand the fears of people outside. I didn't understand the insecurities of people outside. I didn't understand people outside. And a lot of things I said and did affected a lot of people in a lot of different directions. It wasn't intentional. It wasn't with malice aforethought." But a few seconds later when asked if he also felt “remorse,” which presumes guilt, Manson sat for a long time in silence before saying, in resignation, “we reach an impasse here, man.”

Rationality, he said, is a false god. It is part of the game playing of the world. The whole rational logical structure of the world is false and the people who play its games without realizing it are fools. So he had little respect for the law, for the courts, for the lawyers, for any representative of the establishment. The inter-connectedness of all things in the realm behind the veil means that everything is dependent upon all, that there is no individual consciousness, hence no individual freedom, and therefore no individual responsibility. To be, as romantics imagine, in the divine consciousness, to participate in the godhead, is to be as Manson said, “inside of you. I’m inside every one of you. It’s beyond good and evil.”

The point is not simply that Manson is speaking metaphorically. He is doing that, but he is also saying that everything is a metaphor, that our very lives, our bodies, our surroundings, are metaphor; that we live in an illusion if we think this material reality is real. Like Emerson and the earlier romantics, he is a philosophical idealist. He believes that what is ultimately real is not matter but consciousness. This whole thing we call reality, or the universe, is an illusion, a dream. What we call God is the dreamer. And our bodies are no more real than are the strange beings that flit through our dreams at night. The whole world is a thought, and each person’s perceptions are but a series of thought within the framework of the larger thought. As Manson once put it, “everyone’s playing a different game with the thought.” All of the many perceptions of this existence are but dreams within a larger dream. This is where Manson is coming from when he says to the court and the straight world, “I don’t live in your dream.” This is why he says “You've got my body in a cell… but I’m walking in forever, man.” He is freer, he claims, to wander among the mountain in his jail cell than if he were struggling to survive in the day-to-day realities of the outside world. From his perspective, to believe that this physical world is the ultimate reality is to be trapped in the illusion; to be aware of the cosmic mind is to be liberated from the illusion.

Manson’s true crime, and the reason he will remain in jail until his death, is that he didn’t just blur, he erased the line between reality and imagination. He crossed over to the other side, completely outside society [...] Individuals have crossed that line before, many times, but what Manson also did, and what he was convicted for, was, like Socrates, corruption of the innocent. He spun the tales that they believed. His imagination created the constructions which they then acted upon. There is no evidence that Manson ever said directly that his followers should actually kill anyone. What he claims, and what seems believable, is that they believed he wanted them to kill and, freed from the usual inhibitions which would keep middle-class American kids from slaughtering strangers, that they acted out his fantasy and did not need his direct command. Manson is no intellectual in the conventional sense. He is at best self-educated but not at all bookish, having spent his entire life, from childhood up, behind bars. He has a sharp mind and has paid attention to the world around him. But he never had much opportunity to compare notes or to talk with others about ideas. He was like someone who learned French entirely out of books but never heard the language spoken.

Once the human mind is finally liberated from the rituals and traditions, the taboos and inhibitions, which have bound the web of human culture together, anything becomes possible. To some this is the meaning of insanity, to believe things outside the circle of what society allows. “Crazy” becomes a label applied to those who don’t agree with the consensus. But the need to break the bonds of the society’s programming requires that occasionally people step outside the bounds of what is allowed and dare the wilderness, at whatever risk. Says Manson, “It’s so abstract that someone has to carry insanity. Someone’s got to be insane. Someone’s got to be the bad guy.”

But Manson’s repeated claim that he “broke no law of man or God” is not entirely without basis either. For in the prison world in which he grew up and lived most of his life, people are responsible for their own deeds - Period! The act of murder is what is punished, not some vague indirect suggestion by a third party. “I take responsibility for my acts,” he insists. “Every man must take responsibility for his acts. We each live within our own circles.” To this day, Manson still does not understand how the law can hold him responsible for murders that other people actually committed. His stubborn refusal to confess his guilt, as misguided as it may be, is at the very least an honest statement of his beliefs and not an artful dodge. He really believed it relevant that, as he shouted at Diane Sawyer,“I wasn't directing traffic, lady.” Indeed, that is the heart of the enigma of Manson. That is why back in 1969 and still today, so many people find something to admire in him. Bugliosi and other spokesmen for society have tried at times to say that Manson is little more than another two-bit thug, a thief, a pimp, a hustler out for himself, a murderous con filled with uncontrollable rage. It is too neat and too well-known a box. There is more going on.

However appalled one might be by the literal reality of Manson, it is almost impossible not to also take him on the level of symbolic consciousness. “They don’t want to ever let me go,” he explains, “because they feel secure as long as they've got me locked up in that cell. They feel like, yeah, they've got THE MAN locked up right there in a box.” Perhaps this is only literal; or perhaps Manson has taken over the role in society that black people used to play, the symbol of the terrors of the subconscious. We need to keep our rational consciousness safe from the chaos on the other side. So we lock up the subconscious under what Freud called the censor. And through the power of symbolic consciousness we imagine that by segregating black people, or locking Charlie Manson in a cell, we have the irrational forces of the subconscious under our rational control. We try to keep the conditioning going. We try to make the combine run more smoothly by adjusting everyone’s programming so everyone will think and behave as they should.

When Manson argued that his consciousness came from a deeper place “beyond good and evil,” he at least conjured up in the minds of more learned people an historic parallel. Nietzsche, who used that phrase in a famous book, was also the product of a romantic movement, the culmination of nineteenth-century German mysticism. His theory of the Superman who existed outside of the merely artificially constructed codes of bourgeois culture inspired the Nazis. Like Nietzsche, Manson saw that the codes of society are artificial, contingent, and unworthy of respect. Like Nietzsche, he believed himself capable of freeing himself from them and living on a higher plane. He saw the void, but rather than surrender to it, he believed he had what it took to fill the emptiness with a new and better structure. “A lot of the kids,” says Manson, “never met anybody who told them the truth. They never had anybody who was truthful to them. You know, they never had anybody that wouldn't lie or snake or play old fake games. So all I did was I was honest with a bunch of kids.” That is a powerful indictment of our society.

While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him. ― Fyodor Dostoevsky

There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him. ― Antonin Artaud

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. ― Marie Curie

Each of us is more than that worst thing they've done. Even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer. There's this basic human dignity that must be respected by all. I believe, that despite the fact that it is so dramatic, and so beautiful, and so inspiring and so stimulating, we will ultimately not be judged by our technology. We won't be judged by our design. We won't be judged by our intellect and reason. Ultimately you judge the character of a society, not by how they treat their rich and the powerful and their privileged, but by how they treat the poor, the condemned, the incarcerated. Because it is in that nexus that we actually begin to understand truly profound things about who we are. ― Bryan Stevenson

The criminal justice system should not be infected by the profit motive. [...] The notion that you might incentivize people to lock more people in, or keep them there longer - or not provide the kind of rehabilitation services so that they can get out of there, I think that's a problem. ― Barack Obama

We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer. ― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Knowing your own darkness is the best way for dealing with the darknesses of other people. ― Carl Jung

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted. ― Aldous Huxley

I call that mind free which protects itself against the usurpations of society, which does not cower to human opinion, which feels itself accountable to a higher tribunal than man's, which respects itself too much to be the slave of the many or the few. ― W.E. Channing

Birth, play, marriage, children, old age -- life is finished. That is not living! Life is much deeper and more wonderful than that .... When you know God, there is no more sorrow. All those you loved and lost in death are with you again in the Eternal Life. ... Our great whirling planet, our human individuality, were not given to us merely that we might exist for a time and then vanish into nothingness, but that we might question what it is all about. To live without understanding the purpose of life is foolish, a waste of time. The mystery of life surrounds us; we were given intelligence in order to solve it. — Paramahansa Yogananda

The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist that force that is trying to repress, oppress, and fight down the human spirit. ― Mumia Abu-Jamal

He who gives you the diameter of your knowledge, prescribes the circumference of your activity. So when your slave master educates you, he does not educate you to be a threat to him. ― Minister Farrakhan

Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time. ― John Stuart Mill

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first. ― JIM MORRISON

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. ― ALBERT EINSTEIN

Enlightenment is about seeing through the illusions of life and knowing what reality really is. When you are enlightened, you can have everything you want. Because you’ll know the truth about what everything is, and what does it really mean to have something. It is an irony of the world that the people who seek material things and desire to have them before thinking about enlightenment, tend to attain neither, but those that acquire enlightenment first are the ones who do. The desireless attain all their desires. Being desireless is not about having no desire, but it is about having no attachment to desire. Attachment is the cause of all suffering. Suffering is burning emotional energy on the uncontrollable. The more you suffer, the more suffering you attract. Letting go of all attachments is the way to end all suffering. When you are attached, you are in a state of wanting or lacking. When you are detached, you are in a state of being desireless. Enlightenment is about knowing why detachment gets you your desire. By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise. ― ADOLF HITLER

The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison. ― FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

Public education is not meant to inspire. Public education is meant for you to respond reflexively to authority. ― KRS-ONE

I think it's extraordinary that journalists lead the way encouraging people to accept greater government intrusion into their lives. The media, journalists, are supposed to be adversarial to the government, not encouraging people to submit to greater government authority. But I think the broader point is that it's that false dichotomy that, the more the government learns about us, the safer we'll be. In part, because, what history shows is that when governments are able to surveil people in the dark, generally the great outcome is that they abuse that power and it becomes tyrannical. If you talk to anybody who came from Eastern Europe, they'll tell you that "the reason we left is because society has become deadened and soulless". When citizens have no privacy, and it's a difficult concept to understand why privacy is so crucial, but people understand it instinctively – they put locks on their doors not for security but for privacy, they put passwords on their e-mail accounts, because people know that only when you can engage in behavior without being watched, is that where you can explore, where you can experiment, where you can engage in creative thinking and creative behavior. A society that loses that privacy is a society that becomes truly conformist, and I think that's the real danger. ― GLENN GREENWALD

I believe that the public wants to be led, to be instructed, to be told what to do. They want reassurance. They will always move en masse, a mob, a herd, a group, because people want the safety of human company. They are afraid to stand-alone because the belief is that it is safer to be included within the herd, not to be the lone calf standing on the desolate, dangerous wolf-patrolled prairie of contrary opinion- and the truth is that it usually "is" safer to go with the trend. ― JESSE LIVERMORE

Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community. ― BELL HOOKS

Education is about making whole. When you look at the boredom that exists in modern American education, you look at the boredom of the students, you look at the faces they carry to school - because they are wondering "why am I studying this? What is this for? What's the purpose of this?" The smart ones check-out early on, like Bill Gates, who never got a degree from Harvard because he dropped out. That's what happens to the smart ones. Steve Jobs, dropped out. All of these billionaires, they dropped out because they learned early on, "I want to make money and this is not the way to make money." So if you go to college to earn a livelihood, you're wasting your time. You're even now being encouraged to drop out by some of the leading CEO's in America - encouraging students to drop out. Because most of what these students are learning in school will not apply to anything. This is a reality. There is a strong argument now that college is obsolete. [...] There is no real educational philosophy behind these things. [...] This is largely what the college and the university has become in the West. It is no longer a place to pursue Truth. It is a place to pursue money. [...] Without teaching people meaning, without teaching people purpose, you create monsters. You create the disease known as civilization. This is what happens when you divorce education from the sacred. Until we re-establish the true roots of learning and knowledge, and why we're learning, and what is the purpose of knowledge, we will see it get worse and worse and worse. Every civilization - Hindu, Buddhist, Confucianism, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim - all of them understood that learning was to make a better human being. Learning was not to make more money, it was to make a better human being. ― HAMZA YUSUF

I want, if possible, to be the birth of maybe to influence the syllabus of what our children learn in school. A lot of those decisions that you stake as part of your personality, that "I am a white supremacist", happens in high school. Know the history, but truly know the history. Because the way we teach history in this country, whether it's about the genocide of Native Americans, or whether it's about slavery or women's rights, because it's written by the people that are in charge generally, we tend to kind of gloss over the mistakes that have been made, or the injustices or the crimes against humanity. America doesn't teach our children that what happened to the Native Americans was a crime against humanity. We haven't acknowledged that what happened to the African American culture in this country is a crime against humanity; and to apologize as a nation for this crime, this hundred years crime. ― DAVE MATTHEWS

Our education system is designed for the industrial society where you are able to learn a certain skill and use that skill for the rest of your life. But guess what is happening - in the exponentially growing technologies, every skill that you learn becomes obsolete every five to ten years. And when a skill becomes obsolete, what are you supposed to teach? You teach them how to learn. You teach them how to solve the problem. You apply the interdisciplinary approach to solve a particular problem. That means, when you are in a class today and you are told to go out and solve a problem, and you start to work with your peer to get the right answer when you are in an exam, they call that cheating. In the real world, they call that collaboration. Also, we are told when we are in the education system, "here is the question, here are the four potential answers. If you think there are two right answers, you are wrong, there is always one right answer". And we know in the real world, there's always more than one way of doing things, so we are taught to think in a way that kills the creativity. So what if we told our students there is more than one way to doing things, and work together to solve the problems. And you're not learning the disciplines individually but you're applying the interdisciplinary approach to solve a specific problem. That's how you create the abundance of education. ... You have to have a mindset that says nothing is impossible. Anyone of you who starts to think it is impossible, you know what happens, it becomes impossible for you, not for anyone else. ― NAVEEN JAIN

If there's a way of a society committing mass suicide, what better way than to take all the youngest, most energetic, creative, joyous people in your society and saddle them with, like, $50,000 of debt so they have to be slaves? There goes your music. There goes your culture. There goes everything new that would pop out. And in a way this is what's happened to our society. We're a society that has lost any ability to incorporate the interesting, creative, and eccentric people. ― DAVID GRAEBER

If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it. ― FRANK ZAPPA

Too many people ignore their DNA, however, to conform to what their families or society expects of them. A lot of people also decide that professional success has to look a certain way. That's how someone born to design bikes winds up becoming a lawyer, or someone who loves experimenting with makeup works every day pitching someone else's overpriced brand to malls around the county, or someone who cannot go a day without jotting down some ideas for their next poem spends most of their time at the helm of an emergency IT department. To me that's insane. ― GARY VAYNERCHUK

Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all. ― ANDRE GIDE

Too often we make a separation in our lives—there is work and there is life outside work, where we find real pleasure and fulfillment. Work is often seen as a means for making money so we can enjoy that second life that we lead. Even if we derive some satisfaction from our careers we still tend to compartmentalize our lives in this way. This is a depressing attitude, because in the end we spend a substantial part of our waking life at work. If we experience this time as something to get through on the way to real pleasure, then our hours at work represent a tragic waste of the short time we have to live. ― ROBERT GREENE

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away. ― HENRY THOREAU

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. ― ALBERT EINSTEIN

Civilization can only reach high-water mark when each man and woman has chosen his or her proper work. The great tendency of modern life, with its enormous combinations, its concentration of interests and effort, is to annihilate individuality; but the great duty each one owes to himself is to preserve and develop it. He must not allow his education, his employment, or his environment to rob him of his distinctive personality, or efface the stamp placed upon him by the divine hand to distinguish him from all other men. It is his duty to preserve his individuality as he would his character, for it is a part of himself. ― ORISON SWETT MARDEN

Every fact, every department of your mind, is to be programmed by you, and unless you assume your rightful responsibility and begin to program your own mind, the world will program it for you. ― THE CRYSTAL METHOD

Inside every one of us is a garden, and every practitioner has to go back to their garden and take care of it. Maybe in the past, you left it untended for a long time. You should know exactly what is going on in your garden, and try to put everything in order. Restore the beauty; restore the harmony in your garden. If it is well tended, many people will enjoy your garden. ― THICH NHAT HANH

Love and be what you are, for that is the path that will make you what you would like to be. ― TARIQ RAMADAN

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. — ROMANS 12:2

This above all: to thine own self be true; And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. ― SHAKESPEARE

Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood let alone believed, by the masses. ― PLATO

The unexamined life is not worth living. ― SOCRATES

If we all did the work we were most inspired to do and truly desire and enjoy doing, then we would be giving our best gifts to the universe. All of us would benefit from each other’s best gifts. The world would truly be the best place we could live in. Each of us is not really doing our own work, but we are doing the work of the universe. The universe has chosen and created each of us to do a certain part of the work. We have been inbuilt with the inner knowing of what that part is by our heart’s desire and joy.You are not here to do the work of another but your own. You are not irresponsible when you do not try to take care of everything. In fact, you are truly most responsible when you take care of what you truly care about. You are truly responsible when you focus only on being responsible for what is your responsibility rather than trying to take on the responsibilities that belong to others and the universe. By trying to be responsible for everything, you are neglecting the areas that you are truly responsible for.The things that you truly care about are what the universe has placed in your heart to take care of. If it is a certain person, a group of people, a passion, a business, a calling, a mission that you really care about, then that is what the universe has chosen and created for you to give yourself to. We are not guided by outside influences as to what we are supposed to do in this world, but we are guided from the inside, from the desire of the heart which is the voice of spirit. All we have to do is to listen to it.

Powerless to communicate his vision, the artist loses his belief in himself, in his role or mission. Whereas before his escape from the pain of living was through art, today he has no escape except to deny his own validity. For it is the very establishment of a relation between oneself and the cosmos that a new quality of hope will arise, and with hope, faith. We must ask ourselves how it is that faced with a crushing destiny there are some of us who, instead of shrinking or cowering, leap forward to embrace destiny. There are some of us, in short, who in assuming a definite attitude towards the world seek neither to deny, nor escape, nor to alter it, but simply to live it out. Some more consciously than others. Some as though they saw it written in the stars, as though it were tattooed on their bodies.